By Colby Malsbury

Hal Lindsey once informed us there’s a new world coming. The band Queen let us know in no uncertain terms that they wanted it all, and they wanted it now. The church of today, never much concerned about doctrinal incongruities when an opportunity to appear hip and woke presented itself, has amalgamated these two noble aspirations and made the resulting cake all their own.

For years now, we kinists have grouped all Reformed advocates of such a church malignant under the doctrine of ‘alienism’. Yet lately we have had cause to revisit our thoughts on this matter. Useful as it is in highlighting our adversaries’ adulation of the Other – not to mention its suggestion of pre-WWII Freudian psychobabble which our adversaries are also unknowingly in thrall to – the term remains an arcane one, and one that does not deliver the desired gut-punch that a battle for hearts and minds as we are engaged in requires. Ergo, allow me to introduce an alternate term of approbation: Transcalvinism.

Transcalvinism is an offshoot of that big-tent movement all the global passport-carrying hepcats really dig: transnationalism. As hepcat Calvinists grant legitimacy to the United Nations, considering how they think sending in a petition to the General Assembly calling for a global ban on abortion that was signed by twenty people is going to accomplish something, let us observe what UNESCO has to say about the topic:

‘The concept of trans-nationalism refers to multiple ties and interactions linking people and institutions across the borders of nation-states. Trans-national activities can be defined as:

“those that take place on a recurrent basis across national borders and that require a regular and significant commitment of time by participants. Such activities may be conducted by relatively powerful actors, such as representatives of national governments and multinational corporations, or may be initiated by more modest individuals, such as immigrants and their home country kin and relations. These activities are not limited to economic enterprises, but include political, cultural and religious initiatives as well.”

Gaw-lee, Sergeant Carter – that doesn’t sound any different at all from the disinfo campaigns the likes of Bojidar Marinov and Joel McDurmon have been waging online from the catacombs of their comfy offices for far too many years now, does it? Granted, while their poisonous contempt towards the Scriptural injunctions demanding borders has always been readily apparent, their base of readership has largely failed to permeate across the American border, and is largely confined to treasonous pockets of homegrown anarcho-idealism within a reasonable driving or flying distance from their homes. Any day now, though, I’m sure that will change. They certainly do put in the time commitments, though – it’s nice that both must have powerful insidious sources of outside financing that allow them to wax theological all the live long day. Both gents fancy themselves relatively powerful actors on the neo-Reformed stage, but in terms of intelligence and integrity they most certainly are two of the most modest individuals you will ever run across. And while they both ultimately are in it for the money nevertheless political, cultural, and religious initiatives do occasionally give them an extra reason to get out of bed every single afternoon.

But I digress. It was fun, though, wasn’t it?

What, then, constitute the major characteristics of a Transcalvinist?

A Transcalvinist lives his life entirely commited to the tenets of diaspora politics – the activities of an ethnic enclave relocated far away from its native land. The only difference being: the Transcalvinist’s native land is 16th century Switzerland or Scotland. Given that both of these idylls are physically unreachable, he rather presumptuously deduces that the world must be his personal park to stroll through – a status he is also careful to magnanimously grant to all other Christians as well, of course. That this cosmopolitan attitude contradicts the likes of Jeremiah 23:3 (‘And I will gather the remnant of My flock out of all countries whither I have driven them, and will bring them again to their folds; and they shall be fruitful and increase’) bothers him not a whit. He has an entire planet to help reclaim, after all, and it comes as no surprise that his particular brand of post-millennialism very much resembles an ethnic nationalist movement liberally tinged with gnosticism so that we can all be assured the Transcalvinist is not racist. In his day-to-day efforts at societal reclamation, his tactics become indecipherable from one of these movements. For example, there is little difference to be seen in the grandiose yet ultimately meaningless picketings of abortion mills he organizes and similar demonstrations engaged in by, say, Basque separatists – both to equally ineffective result, needless to say.

As borders are obviously pagan hindrances to Christian liberty, so too are races. The Transcalvinist firmly believes that noticing or even acknowledging such differences are part and parcel of ‘the old nature’ that must be expunged so that the Kingdom may reign triumphant. Ergo, it is not enough for the Transcalvinist merely to tolerate interracial Christian marriages, but he must actively promote them and do what he can to relegate the racially homogeneous variety down the memory hole. Track the postings of pictures of happy Christian couples on social media over a course of time. You will find that displaying the all-white variant is growing progressively rarer. The interracial couple gets another chance to virtue signal, and is praised for doing so. The homogeneous couple has succumbed to the error of their ancestors, and is to be pitied at best.

Given that the world is his self-appointed stage, the Transcalvinist would never deign to bloom where he is planted or, to put the phrase in Christian terms, to ‘abide in the same calling wherein he was called’ (1 Corinthians 7:20). How gauche! No, he must rather venture forth into strange lands in order to preach his inclusive gospel, that he might make himself a nuisance over there and everyone can bask in his obvious sincerity. This often leads to tragedy, as was the case with recent slaying of John Chau by irate inhabitants of North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean, but as long as we can spin such deaths as not resulting from what amounts to a glorified vacation, we can feel comfortable eulogizing such as this generation’s David Livingstone at the funeral. In Reformed ranks, the tendency of the likes of Marcus Pittman and Jeff Durbin to jet over to Hawaii for goofball ‘ministry endeavors’ that turn out to be little more than pizza pigouts whenever the fancy takes them is a shining example of this. A Transcalvinist does not necessarily have to leave the comforts of home to make this pathetic display of bottled bonhomie come to life, either. Look at David Bahnsen, and his obnoxious belief that the sheer majesty of financial markets of all stripes is so transcendent that a Christian is committing a grievous sin by not investing every penny he has in such and remaining mired in there for the rest of his life. He, too, is a Transcalvinist.

Transcalvinists get involved in every hot-button social and cultural cause out there – against abortion, for traditional marriage (personal definitions may vary), for some bizarre Third Wave variant of feminism (the ‘monstrous regiment of women’ crusade, anyone?), for tattoos and piercings because Christian liberty, etc. No matter the righteousness or lack thereof of his chosen passion, though, he will always argue his position from a humanist standpoint of ‘natural rights’ over and above any God-ordained authority, that he might ‘maximize his outreach’, or some such other Nielsen-ratings inspired crap. A prime illustration is a recent anti-abortion video put out by Jeff Durbin where (at the 1:12 mark) he actually has the temerity to avow that all human beings are worthy of our ‘reverence’ (!!!!). Far better to save one’s adulation entirely for He who gives such life to begin with, PASTOR Durbin. As the Transcalvinist cannot be everywhere at once, much as he would desire to, he will inevitably glom onto one social issue as his specialty, and develop a myopic vision that once this issue is ‘resolved’, all will be made right again. All we have to do is re-criminalize abortion/pass a defense-of-marriage constitutional amendment/get the gun-grabbers out of elected office/wait for the ink to dry on the Jonathan Edwards tattoo on my back, and my work here is done and let the second Eden usher forth! This petty and arrogant insistence on easing the symptoms while the disease of rampant apostasy infects ever more of the body of Christ wouldn’t even qualify the Transcalvinist as a competent candy striper trainee, let alone a physician.

The Transcalvinist always confuses popularity with orthodoxy. If influential ‘theologians’ with much-viewed YouTube channels and multiple books on the New York Times bestseller list are mouthing the same old leftist canards that the Transcalvinist is, well, what more proof of truth do you require? ‘In the mouth of a multitude of counsellors’, or something equally out of context. Given that all of Christendom is obviously on his side, he becomes insufferable. He has no problem lecturing you on not heeding your church’s elders because they’re toeing the line handed down to them by their Marxist general synod, and you are not. Who art thou who dares to throw a monkey wrench into our syncretic polity, O man? Or maybe it should be O person? The general synod has proclaimed that normative gender roles are limiting, after all.

The Transcalvinist will post an inordinate amount of pictures of his overstuffed bookshelves, and will leaven such vain boastings with proud declarations that he is a ‘theology nerd’ – thus proving that he is far more concerned with living up to the obsessive standards of a demographic descriptor than in anything that God has to say.

The Transcalvinist declares himself free of extra-Biblical Papist superstition by spending all of Christmas Day posting libertarian-themed Star Wars memes on Facebook. Usually he will announce his intention of doing so a week in advance. To God be all the glory!

The Transcalvinist thinks filming a twenty minute monologue video of himself while driving shows him to be a man of action, always on the move for the Gospel’s sake, just like Black Panther would do. Zounds! Is he available for booking at the next Ligonier conference?

I could go on, but I think you get the idea by now.

What more needs to be said? These people are parasites, period. They have forsaken the precepts of the church fathers, replaced them with junk pop-anthropology and -sociology, and declared such to be Inerrant and Irrevocable. They encompass every negative perception there is out there regarding Millennials. I am loath to question any avowed Christian’s regenerative state, but their fruits suggest they look upon the whole of Calvinism as an intellectual exercise in metaphysics that never once touches the heart. These aspire to be elders one day? Fat chance. They’ll collapse the church in a heap of ashes sooner rather than later, then blithely saunter on to something else they can make oh-so-relevant. They are ravenous wolves, hoping to gain access to the flocks, that they might devour. Eschew them. Nay, call them out in your congregations early and often. If they make up a majority of your congregation and vote to excommunicate you, so much the better. The Christianity you save might just be your own.